Chapter 2 - The Ghost of Back BayClara stood near the hostess stand, her dark hair pinned up in a loose, elegant knot that allowed a few stray tendrils to frame her face. She was wearing a simple emerald-green wrap dress that caught the restaurant's warm lighting, her expression a mix of maternal exhaustion and radiant beauty. She had grown up, lines of quiet resilience softening the youthful features Dominic remembered, but the fierce, independent spark in her eyes remained utterly unchanged.
For a heartbeat, the restaurant around them vanished. The clinking of crystal glasses, the murmurs of wealthy diners, the low hum of jazz music—all of it dissolved into absolute silence.
Clara turned as her boys swarmed around her skirts, chattering excitedly.
Then her eyes lifted.
She saw him.
The color drained from Clara’s face so fast she staggered half a step backward, her hand instinctively flying to her throat. Her breath caught in a sharp, audible gasp. For a moment, she looked as though she were staring straight through the veil of reality at a phantom she had mourned, cursed, and tried desperately to forget for seventy-two months.
“Dominic...” she breathed, the name slipping past her lips like a forbidden secret.
“Clara,” he whispered back, stepping across the Persian runner in the hallway, closing the distance between them as if pulled by an invisible, gravitational cable.
The boys looked back and forth between their mother and the towering, impeccably tailored man in the navy suit, sensing the sudden, suffocating tension in the air.
“Mom?” Julian, the eldest by a minute, tugged gently on Clara’s sleeve. “Do you know him?”
Clara didn't answer immediately. Her dark eyes, swimming with a turbulent sea of shock, anger, and long-buried grief, locked onto Dominic’s face. She scanned the sharp lines of his jaw, the expensive fabric of his suit, and the unmistakable stamp of the Moretti family power radiating from his stance.
Then, a bitter, defensive wall slammed down behind her eyes.
“No, sweetie,” Clara said, her voice trembling slightly as she forced a tight, brittle smile for her sons. “Just... someone from a very long time ago. Come on, boys. Our table is ready.”
She turned sharply on her heel, her posture rigid, her hand gripping Leo’s shoulder tightly as she steered them toward the main dining room.
Dominic didn't hesitate. He crossed the remaining space, his long strides eating up the hallway, and caught her by the lightly bare skin of her wrist.
The touch sent an electric shock straight up his arm.
Clara stopped. She didn't turn around right away, but her shoulders squared. When she finally spun back to face him, her expression was a mask of cold, unyielding fury.
“Let go of me, Dominic,” she whispered fiercely, keeping her voice low so the surrounding diners wouldn't notice. “You made your choice six years ago. You chose your family name, your empire, your gilded cage. Leave us alone.”
“You have four children,” Dominic said, his voice shaking with a mix of awe and dangerous, rising realization. He looked past her shoulder toward the boys, who were watching from a few feet away with wide, curious eyes. “Four boys. Exactly six years old. Clara... are they... are they mine?”
Clara let out a short, harsh laugh that held no humor whatsoever.
“Your sons?” She tilted her chin up, her eyes blazing with unshed tears. “What makes you think a man like Dominic Moretti would ever want four sons tied to a penniless outsider? You walked away without a backward glance when your father gave you that ultimatum. You chose the Moretti crown. Well, enjoy your kingdom, Dominic. Because you lost any right to mine the day you walked out that door.”
Before Dominic could formulate a response—before he could explain the brutal, suffocating ultimatum his dying grandfather had forced upon him, or the lies his uncle had fed him about Clara’s departure—a sleek black town car pulled up to the restaurant’s valet entrance outside the glass facade.
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And through the front windows, Dominic saw something that sent a jolt of ice through his veins.
Sloane Barrett’s personal driver had just stepped out of the vehicle, holding an umbrella against the drizzle. Sloane herself was inside, coming to find out why her fiancé was twenty minutes late for their engagement night.
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